Yesterday Adrian installed an air conditioner in the living room.
Today we put up the Halloween decorations.
The strange thing about this place is how your body adapts to the climate. I suppose it's the same in other places, too, but I haven't been other places, so I don't really know.
It doesn't get too hot here. Temperatures rarely exceed 90 degrees (highest recorded temp for Honolulu was 95). It doesn't get very cold, either. Lows are usually in the 60 degree range (53 was the lowest recorded temp for Honolulu). Despite being a tropical island, the temperatures are moderated by our mid-ocean location and the California Current.
It's about 83 degrees today. In early October.
When we first moved here in August of 2003, the temperature was wonderful. It wasn't so stiflingly hot. We didn't have AC. We'd just open the windows and let the trade winds move through the house.
The winter had no bite. It gets rainy during the winter, and a touch cooler and the ocean swells to the delight of the surfers, but we had no need for long sleeved shirts or heaters.
Through the last couple of years, we've adjusted to the climate. Summer feels hot. Sweaty hot. When the temperature dips a bit, it feels cold. Jacket and hot cocoa cold.
Even though the temps are so level, we suffer like the folks on the mainland because our bodies have adapted.
But without the crisp Fall air. Without the dry, crunchy grass. No brilliant amber fallen leaves strewn across lawns throughout the state.
There are no monotonous grey winter skies breached by gnarled naked winter trees. No soft white flakes fluttering down and melting onto car hoods. No mountainous icy drifts or crunchy layers with which to create snowballs and towering snowmen.
The blissfully torturous anticipation of the return of the greens and red and yellows and pinks of spring doesn't exist here.
It's always green. Always wet and lush. The sun shines. The sky is a brilliant baby blue.
Poor me, right? Living in a temperate tropical paradise.
But I miss those visual cues that make holidays and changing of the seasons so obvious. I miss wearing tacky Halloween sweaters and jumping in piles of gathered leaves. I miss warming a sharply cool house with the scent and heat of baking gingerbread. I miss sloppy hot nachos and blankets from home at small town football games. I miss the smoky strong scent of the wood burning in my grandparents' big stove and escaping that overheated house to chase the kids in the dry bare orchard under an appropriately bleak Texas panhandle sky.
I miss home, I guess.
Texas.